Voice service providers are very concerned with analyzing and controlling the delay through the various links within their telecommunication networks. Connections with high delays disrupt natural conversation and cause any echo problems to be more pronounced. However, direct measurements of delay through any subsection of a connection are difficult at best and require equipment to be physically deployed at locations in the field at the boundaries of the link of interest. Such deployment is, except for the exceptional case, financially prohibitive.
Current techniques for measuring network delays from remote, centralized locations require multiple delay measurements on test calls that first include and then exclude the network link of interest. These techniques require the taking of the difference between the two delays to calculate the link delay. These techniques are prone to error since the same call route is not guaranteed on each call. Moreover, excluding only the link of interest may be difficult.
Accordingly, in addition to the common measurement of end to end delay, it would be desirable to measure the delay through various links in a correction to thoroughly characterize networks and to identify and solve problems associated with delay.